Silly Football In The Swindle Dev’s Behold The Kickmen

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Here’s a curious thought experiment: what if football were played by human beings rather than sentient cars? How would they turbo boost? How would they even kick the ball? Dan Marshall – him what made The Swindle and is the mean half of Ben & Dan – has some ideas. He’s making Behold the Kickmen, a game where football is played on a round pitch by kickmen with the power to charge up and hyper-curve shots. Have a look at this imaginative vision of an alternate reality:

You can tell he’s awfully proud of himself for having spent ages on the boring work of making menus but I swear he does show the game itself eventually. Skip in two minutes for that. And then, the kickmen!

They take to the circular pitch to play what Dan imagines football is probably like. Players charge up scorching tackles, magically swerve the ball after it leaves their feet, and score bonus points if they knock goals in from far away. He is an imaginative lad.

No word yet on when Behold the Kickmen will launch.

[Disclosure: I once advised Dan Marshall on exposing more of his chest hair to attract “the ladies”. He has since married. I’m not saying that it’s because of me, but I do think that he should.]

Y’see… I may not be seeing it, but.. this seems to share the same issue as old, old kick-off, in that for a strictly top-down footeh game, it’s zoomed in too close, meaning you can’t see where you’re kicking…

What was with the powering-up of a shot? That confused me. It appeared that the long you hold, the wider the cone which suggests the less accurate the shot? If so why did he seem to be using it all the time?

Not sure how I feel about buying a Size Five game after The Swindle. It sure seemed like a fun idea for a game, but it barely worked. I don’t recall a whole lot of games where the basic controls were so poorly implemented. After 90 minutes of playing, I don’t feel like ever coming back to it.

I was researching the game during the Steam sale and there were a lot of comments from folks with similar issues with the controls. From following the threads a bit further, it seems it is linked to frame rate issues, and there are some recommended fixes. Post from Dan on the issue here.

That’s a pretty dismissive description of Mr Marshall’s simulation, if you ask me. That said, it’s clear that Dan has only a limited grasp of “The Beautiful Game” (obviously coined by someone who’d never had to sit through 90 minutes of the Portuguese Euro 2016 robbers) as there are apparently no Kickwomen.